Why They Keep Promising to Cut Back (And Why It Never Works)

I'll cut back. I promise. Maybe you've said that to your family members. Maybe you're a family member and you've heard that from your loved ones. It's a very common statement and intention in the recovery process, but as we already know, it usually leads to a lot of broken promises. And I want to explain why that is, what the intention behind it is, Why it normally doesn't work. And I also want to talk a little bit about how to respond to that kind of situation, whether you are the person who's broken the promises, how to respond, or you're the person, the family member who is on the other side of that broken promise. I want to talk about both sides and the best way to respond to the situation from every angle. The reason this Came into my mind for a video for today is because of a couple of, it kind of came up in a couple of ways this week. One way is in our family coaching group that Kim and Campbell do. There were some questions that they got, and one of the questions that was asked kind of reminded me of, it was around this topic. And then also from one of the consultations that I recently had, there was some questions and I even see this in our Facebook group a lot too, some questions about What do I do when my husband, son, brother, whoever it is, my loved one promises that they're only going to drink on the weekends or they're only going to smoke no more than twice a month or whatever limit that they've set for themselves, and then they break that promise? And a lot of times the question is, should I bring it up? What should I do about it? And that's a very tenuous kind of situation. You got to be really careful because inadvertently you can make the situation worse. I'm not saying it's your fault, but you could add fuel to the fire, not meaning to, but it can definitely happen. And if you're the person who's struggled with some kind of addiction and you've made these statements, then you know that when you say them, when you make these promises, you probably mean them, right? For the most part, you mean them. I mean, occasionally, sometimes people will just say whatever they feel like they need to say to make their family shut up. But in my experience, most of the time when people make these promises and set these limits, they really truly have the intention to keep them. It just doesn't work very well. And recovery requires a lot of trial and error. I've never seen someone have an addiction, say they're going to cut it back, and that was it. They cut it back, end of story, problem over. If that's the case, I mean, that's happened before, but that's not addiction if that's happened. Because addiction, the very definition and nature of it is a continued behavior or substance use despite consequences. And in the clinical criteria, one of those criteria is multiple efforts to cut back, control, or stop the substance use are unsuccessful. Now, a lot of times these efforts and intentions, they're successful for short periods of time, but ultimately The dam always breaks, bad crap happens, and it ultimately doesn't work in the long term. And it's not because the person doesn't mean it. It really isn't. It's really more about the nature of addiction. It's quite natural for any of us to want to slow down, reduce our use or behavior without cutting something totally out. Because when it's an addiction, we still have it in our head that Whatever this addiction is does something positive for us. And so we're going to be bargaining, negotiating ways to try to keep it in our lives somehow. The best way I know how to describe it is like trying to deal with a breakup by saying, let's be friends and putting it in the friend zone. Now we all know that does not work very well, right? Eventually one person is going to be liking the other person more and Feelings are going to get hurt. Arguments are going to happen. Bad stuff's going to go down. Now, eventually, if you're in the breakup situation, you can probably be friends, but not right initially out the gate, right? So that's what I call when people are trying to cut it back and control it. And I always say, you're trying to put it in the friend zone, and I'm not sure that's going to work. And then people usually giggle because they're like, yeah, the friend zone thing doesn't usually work. That's what I want you to think about when you think about this whole cutting it back thing. The reason it doesn't work is because the simple answer, I'll give you the simple answer and then I'll go a little bit more into science. But the simple answer to it is that when you put, when you engage in the addictive behavior, whatever that is, it triggers the whole psychological process. The dominoes start falling and then you want to go all in. So that's part of it, right? So keep that in your mind. The other part is as you've developed an addiction, your tolerance for whatever this thing or behavior is has gone through the roof. So a little bit early, is it going to do anything for you? Let's be real. Whether that's a substance, whether that's gambling, shopping, sex, whatever it is, a little bit's probably not going to work for you because your tolerance is really high. And so when you reengage in that, it just triggers the whole craving process to set off. And so it sounds good in theory to want to reduce it and cut it back. And Most of the time when people tell me what their plan is, I'm like, yeah, I kind of think I kind of agree. If you can put it in that, if you can contain it in that arena, it really isn't a problem. I'm cool with it. I'm just not sure either that you can do that because it's going to make you want it all the time, or that you want to do that. Because even if you're somehow using all of your strength and willpower and you're able to keep it into the limits, you're not going to like it. It's not going to be fun because it's going to keep you craving and wanting more. And in my experience, eventually your willpower breaks and then you cave and then you fall back into your old patterns. And when that happens, your family and your friends, they see that as a broken promise. And a lot of times they even feel like it's intentional. They feel like that the person never meant it in the first place or that they're not trying. And I usually find that that's not the case. It's more That the person with the addiction is either lying to themselves and, or they're trying to convince themselves that they can do that, or they just don't really understand the nature of the addiction and why it works the way it works. The other complicating factor that happens in there in the science kind of way is your brain does this rebound effect and it depends on what the substance is, what the rebound effect is. But a really quick way to know what it is, it's the opposite of whatever The good thing that you want out of it is. So for example, if your addiction is to stimulants and you like to feel energized and motivated and focused, the rebound effect is the opposite. So it's like the withdrawal process. The way your brain tries to get you back into balance is to turn up the dial on those opposite brain chemicals that do the opposite thing for you. So The rebound process from a stimulant is depression, lack of energy, can't wake up, can't focus on anything, don't care, don't have any motivation or desire to do anything. And it works like that with almost all substances, right? And it also works like that even in behavioral addictions to some degree. So like alcohol is a central nervous system depressant, and most people like alcohol because it makes you feel disinhibited, less stressed about things. I want to say more calm and relaxed, but sometimes people feel like it gives them a little energy, but there's this easiness, right? And that's what we're wanting from the substance. But the rebound effect from that is the backlash is basically what it is, is it's a lot of stressed out anxiety neurochemicals. And so after the fact, like the next day or even later on in the drinking Timeline, you get this backlash effect where you have a lot of this anxious, excitatory, thinking too much brain chemical going on. And if you've ever had an alcohol problem, you probably know what I'm talking about. Have you ever had that thing? If you have had this, like put an emoji in the chat or in the comments below, put a little alarm clock emoji. Because what happens is you find that you wake up at some ungodly time. In the morning, but I call it truly in the middle of the night, like 2, 3, 4, 5 o'clock in the morning, and your head is going 100 miles an hour. Sometimes it can get to the point where you feel like you might even have a panic attack. That what you're experiencing right then is the rebound effect. It's like you can go to sleep, but you can't stay asleep. And another side note, which isn't really with the topic, but when you do sleep and you're sleeping because of alcohol or something like that, you're not getting the Stage 4 sleep. So you're not getting rest, you're not restoring your body, which is what sleep is designed to do. It's designed to refuel you and you're getting no refuel when you're going to sleep from alcohol because you really just passed out, not really sleeping. So that's a whole nother thing. But that thing about waking up with your head going a million miles an hour, some of you are going to really relate to that. And that is the rebound effect. What's the rebound effect from pain pills? Pain. Lots of it. Everything hurts. Your skin hurts. Your hair hurts. Everything hurts. Your anxiety's crazy because one of the things that pain meds do other than fight pain is it not just fights physical pain, but it also covers up emotional pain. So the rebound effect of that is increased pain on every level. Like your anxiety is going crazy. Your psychology is going crazy. Everything hurts. It's a mess, right? Whatever it is that you think you're getting from whatever your addiction is, ultimately you get the opposite. And the longer that addiction progresses, the worse and worse that cycle gets. And so when you're far, when you're medium to far into an addiction and you try to cut it back, your brain has put this, because you've done it so long, it's put this whole rebound process on autopilot. And so as soon as you, sometimes even before you engage in the behavior, like when you're thinking about it too hard or you have a big enough trigger, your brain starts to do like a muscle memory kind of thing and it starts to have that rebound effect. As soon as you put the first drink in, the first smoke, the first snort, whatever it is, your brain immediately starts to try to balance you out because it's trying to keep you alive with this rebound effect. And so that is a huge reason why the cutting it back thing doesn't happen. That's where that craving, number one, is coming from. And number two, that rebound effect. If your body is used to drinking a gallon of vodka a day and you say, I'm just going to have 2 shots a day, as soon as you probably before you even drink the first shot, you just pour the shot. Okay? Your brain's going to start producing all of those rebound neurochemicals in an effort to get ahead of what it knows is coming. That's why the cutting it back thing doesn't work. That's why tolerance occurs because your body tries to put your brain and your body tries to put as many things as possible on autopilot. And that's not just with addiction, but that's with everything so that it can conserve its energy sources, which are basically just little ATP molecules, little sugar molecules in your blood to do the most important task. So anything your body can put on autopilot does. So same thing with addiction. If you're used to using every day, smoking every day, drinking every day, shopping every day, whatever. It puts this rebound process on autopilot trying to keep you balanced out. That's why the cutting it back thing doesn't work. And even if by some miracle you're able to white-knuckle it into the lines where you're just stressing yourself out to the max, keeping it in the lines, I'm like, Is that worth it? That's what I say to my clients. I'm like, I don't think that's very fun, right? I don't think them 2 drinks really did much for you because your tolerance is really big, but I think it stressed you out. I think you had to put a lot of energy and efforts. And a lot of times people have to make these big complicated formulas and plans about how they're going to stay in the limits. I'm like, dude, that's too much work. And most of the time people eventually, they're like, I think you're right. It's not much pleasure and it is a lot of work. And to top it off, to make matters worse, is as long as you're still doing a little, you don't get the good part of recovery. Your brain chemistry never normalizes. You don't feel better. Your ability to enjoy other things don't come, doesn't come back. You don't have that like spiritual peacefulness, that contentment that you could have if you just let it go. So I always say it is much easier to do none than a little. Now, some addictions, that's not really an option. And those are really hard ones, right? Some addictions like food addiction, for example, you can't just not eat ever, right? It will be easier in some ways to do that because you're retriggering that cycle every time you reengage in it. If your addiction is one that you can let go of totally, I am telling you, life will be much easier to just let go of it completely. You will feel better. Eventually those cravings will go away. You won't even think about it. And when you do, it won't even feel like a craving. It'll just be like a thought that comes in and out and you won't be held hostage anymore. You will have freedom to put your thoughts on whatever you want to think about, to put your energy to whatever you want to. You won't have to carry around those stupid secrets and that shame that you're carrying around. The freedom that you get from letting it go is just unmeasurable. And so cutting it back 99% of the time doesn't work. And I'm really only saying 99% because I don't know that you can say 100% on anything. I'm not even saying that because sometimes it does. It really just, in my experience, it just doesn't work for people who have addictions. If you could control your use effectively, we probably aren't calling it an addiction, right? This is the nature of it. So let's talk about what to do when that happens. And we're going to talk about this from both sides. So this is a question I got recently, which is, should I bring it up to my loved one? This is a great question, right? They promised they're not going to drink hard liquor anymore. They're just going to drink wine or beer or whatever the promise was. You can apply this to any addiction. They promise they're not going to spend more than $100, whatever. Apply it to any addiction. If you bring it up, there's a couple of problems with that. Number one, and some of y'all know what I'm going to say, you're going to be in a bad guy role because people are going to be defensive. It's our natural instinct and reflex to be defensive, even if we know you're right. No one likes to be called out. It makes us defensive. Even if we know, I mean, it's just, you can't hardly help it. You get in that fight or flight reflex and you either shut down or you say nasty, mean things back to the other person, or you're defensive about it, or you lie about it and it doesn't work out well. Secondly, so besides the fact that puts you in the beggar role, and y'all know I have many videos on that about why that's not good, it might help them to contain it and keep it in the limits. And that's not a good thing. So when your loved one makes these promises that they're just going to do this and they're not going to do it then, and they're only going to do blah, blah, blah, and they're going to avoid these certain traps and they don't do it, if you're constantly reminding them, policing it, like telling them at the restaurant they can't order the next one, the worst possible thing that could happen is you could be somewhat successful in Helping them keep their limit. And the problem with that is, is that now you're slowing down the learning process. What you really want is for people to figure it out faster. If you help someone keep their limit, then they start to feel like, okay, I got this, things are better. And now we've slowed down this process, this active stage of change process of what we need to do to get out of denial and get to the point where we're ready to just let it go. You're slowing it down. So If your loved one is trying to cut it back, I think that you should let them try to cut it back at least several times. And they'll try various ways of doing this. And I think it's smart to let people do this because people have to trial and error this before they come to the conclusion they're going to let it go, right? So letting them do it is important and letting them fail at it is important. Now, I don't want you to set them up for failure. Like if your loved one's trying to drink less, I don't want you to go to the and keep ordering shots and like speed it up because then they won't learn their lesson. They'll just blame you. They'll be like, that's your fault. So you can't make it worse for them, but you don't have to fix it for them either. Now occasionally they might ask you to help them keep it in the reins a little bit, and this is treacherous territory here. Okay? Like they may ask you to do things like hold their money or don't let them Get more than this or stay with them so they don't go overboard or whatever. And if your loved one asks you to do it, I'm still not even sure it's a good idea to do it. Okay? Mostly I say if they ask you to do it and you know that they are not going to turn into some kind of really angry monster person that's going to then be really mad at you for doing what they ask you to do. Okay, fine. You can do it if you want to. But in most situations where I see it, and I see it like, I want you to hold my prescription meds and only give me what I'm supposed to have. I want you to make sure that I don't buy hard liquor. I want you to hold my money and don't give me more than $10 at a time. What ends up happening is they end up getting mad at you. You end up being the bad guy again because they ask you to do it. So I'll let you use your own judgment on that, but beware of the backfire effect from that. Okay? Now let's move over into if you are the person that maybe you're the one that has said, I'm going to cut it back. I hear you. I get it. And I know that you mean it. If that's you, and maybe you're still trying to do that, listen, I've dealt with a lot of people, thousands of people, but I certainly haven't dealt with everyone. So I'm not going to say it can't be done. I'm just saying I don't think you're going to like it. If you can do it. But if you're still trying to do that and you are failing, I'm going to give you some secret magic words here. Okay? Like this is going to help you. So listen here. When that happens and you get outside the limits of what you promised you were going to do, I want you to, number one, I want you to acknowledge it. And I know you're not going to want to because you're not going to want to get a bunch of I told you so's and you need to go to treatment and blah, blah, blah. But You're going to get them anyway. You're going to get them worse if you don't say it, because I promise you this is what your loved one's thinking, and I promise you they know. Okay? If they watch my videos, they might not be saying something, but they know. So acknowledge it. And then I want you to tell your loved one, look, I get this issue and I don't have it totally figured out yet, but I am taking it seriously. Because at least if you do that, It conveys that you get that this isn't working well and that you need to figure out some other things with it, right? And it at least validates their concern. When you try to act like it's not happening and you do the gaslighting and you make them the bad guy, you make yourself seem less insightful. And that's what makes it seem like you never intended to do better in the first place. That's what gives your loved one that impression. If you can handle it with humility, and maybe even if you're going to try it again. If you can still handle it with humility and own it and talk about it with your loved one, they'll handle it better. Okay? And if they're watching my videos, they'll handle it quite well. If they're not watching my videos, they're not going to love it, but it's going to be better. I promise, because we all just want to feel heard and understood, and we're going to have to walk into some hard conversations with humility in order to do that. Now, another way that this comes up is what if, like for example, what if my loved one has relapsed and I know they've relapsed, but they don't know that I know they've relapsed? That one can be tricky. And I think this one is a judgment call. I think you have to know the personality of the person well enough. You have to know If they're going to get crazy defensive, if they're going to try to gaslight you, if they're going to try to like, if it's just going to blow things up. If that's the case, then just wait 5 minutes. It'll surface itself in a way that it's completely visible to you, them. They know that you know, like the unmanaged vulnerability shows up. If you just wait 5 minutes, I promise it will. But sometimes it can help someone get it under control if you pull it to the surface, if they're really trying to do the recovery thing. Because sometimes people find themselves in a relapse and they want to stop, but they can't get the brakes on it by themselves and they're trying to do it in secret. And that really doesn't let them get the brakes on it because they're trying to do it in secret. So sometimes I do think it's helpful to bring it to the surface. It's just that you need to be Kind, or at least neutral about how you bring it to the surface. And if you will enter the conversation with kindness and humility, it'll go better. Say, look, I know you've really been trying hard. You've been doing great. You've had a— I know you've had a slip up. Don't ask them if they've had a slip up because they're going to lie to you. Even if they're really trying, it's an instinct. Just say, hey, Or you can say, I feel like maybe you've had some slips or something, but I want you to know I'm still in your corner and you haven't lost everything yet. You go into damage control mode. I've got videos on here about what to do if your loved one relapses, and this is damage control mode because the last thing you want to do is come down really hard on them because they're already in a relapse. It's hard to get control of, and when they're feeling defensive and angry, It's like now they're feeling totally justified and they're not, they're just mad at you. They're going to keep doing it just to get back at you usually, or just to feel like a power struggle, like you can't control me, I'll do what I want to do kind of thing. So use your judgment on whether to bring it up if you know, but they don't know that you know. I know that's like 10 layers of complicated, but these are questions that come up all the time and they're very, the solutions and the answers are counter your instinct. You as the family member are going to want to say something and you're going to want to say it sassy at best, probably angrily and with a lot of resentment and hostility. You as the person who's struggling with this, you're going to want to hide it. You're going to want to justify it. You're going to want to blame. You're going to want to make excuses, but I want you to go against those instincts. If you and your loved one, you guys are trying to get through this together, you're going to have to be a team on it. If at all possible, that is the scenario that works best. All right, we are about to take some questions and some comments, so if you're watching live, go ahead and put those in the chat. Put some question marks in front if you think of it, because it helps Bree to see that you're trying to ask a question, and she can kind of scan through those and see them easier. And but while you do that, I will remind you that there are resources in the description. And speaking of that, one of the resources in the description is the Amber AI, which is going wonderfully. Like, Amber AI is working all the time. It's amazing to see all the conversations that are being had. One of the things you guys might not know about Amber AI, and if you don't know what that is, it's an artificial version of me, like a chat that you can chat back and forth with and brainstorm with and get advice with and get encouragement from and help you to come up with the right Words to say and that kind of thing. But one of the things you guys might not know about Ambria is that she actually gives me insights based on the conversations that are happening. That doesn't mean she's telling me, giving up all your information or anything, but but the AI behind the scenes is is sort of you know like analyzing all these conversations to find themes and what are the conversations that people are having. And so every few days. She gives me new insights and sometimes I'm like, yeah, I could see that. I could have guessed that. And then other times I'm like, I never thought about that like that. Well, this week, yesterday I was looking in there and she gave me an insight that I hadn't thought of before. And I thought was, I mean, it was surprising, but spot on. And so Amber, I said, she said, um, some version of your, the people that talk to Amber that are struggling with addiction. respond better and are much more motivated by legacy. Legacy is a bigger motivator for people to stop and change than those personal negative consequences, particularly like health. So things like, how are people going to remember you? What's this doing? What's going on with your children? What kind of person do you want to be? How's this interfering with your main purpose in life? Those are things that really speak to the core of people that don't get talked about a lot, but deep down inside really matter to people. And those are, that's a bigger motivator according to Amoree. And when I think about it, I have to agree for people. So when you are trying to kind of come up with your reasons, maybe you can kind of think about what it is that's important to you as far as your legacy, your values, how you want to be remembered. What kind of person do you want to be? If you are thinking about this from the family perspective, that's a really important thing to remember because a lot of times what you guys, what the family does is they want to go from like a health perspective. And if a person's health is really important to them, sometimes that's a big motivator and it helps, but most of the time it doesn't. And the reason why is because we all know that it affects our health badly. Any addiction does. But usually the way it affects our health badly is kind of slow over a long course of time. It's really just easy to ignore. So the whole like showing the pictures of the black lungs and the studies and the this and the that, I find that it's not usually very effective at all. I call it like a scare tactic. Occasionally if somebody is very focused on health, that will work. Or if they get like a really bad doctor's report and it's not just theoretically bad for your health, but clearly it It's not good. That will work. But these deeper, more spiritual aspects tend to resonate with people a lot more as far as motivators. I don't know. I thought that was interesting. Do you guys think that's interesting? I kind of thought that I had to agree, but I never thought about it that way. So if you're interested in Amber AI, the link to that is in the description. And then also all of our other services, like our family coaching group, like our Recovery coaching, all that kind of stuff. It's there. Let's take some questions and some comments for you. What do we have? Can you explain the term kindling? I don't think I'm familiar with that term as far as in addiction recovery. I mean, I could kind of guess because I know what the term means in a general sense, but I don't want to try because I'll just be guessing. So somebody else, if you know that term, put it in the chat or the comments, help us out. Help me out here. I'm gonna, I'm gonna do the phone a friend thing here. Ask you guys to help. I don't know. Um, Ashaya says he relapsed. I don't know for sure if he did stop. Now I'm done. I just left it to himself. I don't care what he does. He thinks he's not getting support. Everything is my fault. How to deal? So basically he had a relapse and you're at the end of your rope and you're just like, that's it. I'm out. I don't care what you do. Do what you're going to do. Well, I guess in some ways he's right. He's not getting support, but I'm sure that you've been supporting for a very long time. I'm sure that you didn't just throw your arms up in the air at the first sign of trouble. And so this is a manipulation tactic. It's a way of putting it back on you. It's a guilting tactic. And I wouldn't fall for it. Jane says, one of my closest friends just admitted to me today that she's an alcoholic. She approached me with a lot of courage and vulnerability. I want to make sure I best support her through this very early stage while still fearing Calling herself an alcoholic, fully admitting to struggling with this. What is the best approach to support her at this time? Such a great question. And she's so lucky, Jane, to have you as a friend, to be thinking so strategically and really having the heart to care and be asking video, watching videos and asking questions to be such a good friend. One of the things that you can do is Ask questions about what's making her think that. Ask like, what makes you feel like you're an alcoholic? What have you tried in the past? And it's almost like you're just pulling more information out of her about her thoughts about the alcohol. Because the reason why that helps is it helps for the person to come more and more out of denial. Because when they say these things out loud, it becomes more and more real to them. And When you're asking them questions like, what have they tried before? What works? What hasn't worked? What do they think would help? You're helping them get clarity on these things. So just asking questions and being a good listener is the most helpful thing that you can do. All right, next question. My alcoholic boyfriend is so mean to me when he's drinking. I feel so sad with my life. He has been drinking for 2 weeks straight, not eating and not taking his daily medications. Is he giving up? It sounds to me like he's in such a bender. He is probably like in blackout zone and blackouts where it's like he may be awake, but he is not driving the boat anymore. My guess is he's so far in it, like especially with alcohol because you really just Your filter turns off. Your ability to make decisions goes down. That he really can't get the brakes put on it at this point. Something's going to have to intervene, whether that's you know he's going to have to have some kind of wake-up call. Something's going to have to happen to get to get him to see what's going on. I don't know that it means. I guess in some ways he's given up, but in other ways I'm saying if he's been drinking that many days straight, I don't even think he's checked. in enough to make a conscious decision about it. I'm almost 2 years sober. Your videos are so insightful and your Rottweiler on a leash analogy has stuck with me for months. That's awesome, Kristen, and congrats on 2 years sober. That's amazing. Tell us in the chat how you did it. Give us some advice. A major way that helps keep me sober is to remember that When I enjoy it, I can't control it. And when I control it, I can't enjoy it. It's just not worth it. Man, that was beautiful, Kristen. Spot on. Such a better, more succinct way of saying it than I said it, right? Like, I'm like, you might can do it, but you're not going to like it. Like, controlled use is not fun. Why do it? It takes a lot of work. I'm 100% with you, Kristen. What else advice and feedback do you have for us? We want your wisdom. 2 years is very impressive. My BF was sober for almost 2 years and relapsed. He's been drinking 9 beers a day now for over 2 years and is proud that he's not doing 16+ like he was before. He has never been saying he needs to cut back. He recognizes the negative impact but doesn't know how to relax or enjoy at the end of the day. How can I support him? Well, I got to be honest with you, Linda. My first thought was to be skeptical, not of you, but of him. Like to say, I doubt he's sticking with the 9 beers, like super flat. Like maybe he is. That was just my first thought. But you got to remember, I deal with people who struggle with addiction, so I immediately get skeptical. So I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm doubtful that he's sticking with it. The thing that I would want this person to know if they were my client, Linda, is I would want them to know that the reason that it's the only way that they can enjoy and relax at the end of the day is because they have an alcohol problem. It's that rebound effect that is causing them to feel so anxious and high-strung and irritable and uneasy and discontent, all of those things. It's because of the rebound from the alcohol. And so that's another reason why I'm so doubtful about this very consistently sticking to the 9 beers. Maybe he's drinking less, but he's continuing the cycle of the rebound effect. And if he could break from that cycle, it's not going to be too awful long till his brain chemicals restabilize and he Can experience joy and happiness and not have that stress. Like he needs to drink to relieve the stress of the drinking. Now you have to be careful how you say that. You have to have your right moment. You can't come at someone in an attacking way. But I feel like once people really understand that, they start to at least think about maybe there's a way out. Dale says. My loved one told me this week that she is getting tired of drinking. She's ready to quit next week. How do I know if she means it or she's placating me? Well, 2 things, Dale. If she brought it up on her own, then that's a really good sign that she means it. If she said that After a big fight or a confrontation, or you caught her doing something bad, it's still possible she means it, but it could just be a, I'm just trying to say whatever to placate you. But I find that when people bring it up themselves, they mean it because when you're trying to keep secrets and you're trying to keep an addiction going, you want to stay as far away from the conversation as possible. So I guess that's the answer. To my question now, the whole next week thing, that's probably kind of what's making you skeptical. I'm guessing that Dale is like, well, why don't you stop now? It's not that uncommon for people to be like, on Monday or after we get through this big project at work or after the holiday to have these sort of lines in the sand that feel like a good starting place. And I'm not opposed to letting people try that. I mean, I've seen it work. I've seen it not work. But the fact that she's wanting to quit and talking about it, that is absolutely change talk and it's a good indicator. I don't know whether she'll be able to do it or not. It may take some trial and error, but it's definitely change talk. I'm very confused by my husband. He got to a really bad place in December and myself and a few of his friends spoke to him about his drinking. Since then, he's cutting back significantly, but still drinks every day out of dependence. He is functioning and drinking less, but he eats terrible food at night, stays up late, and still seems like he's constantly— I think you're saying constantly running away from life. I'm not sure what to do in this stage because he doesn't think he needs to quit because he's doing well enough. Help. Thank you. Great question, Grace, because this comes up a lot. He's in the bargain, right? This is his bargaining. I've cut it back. I'm doing better. And you can't push someone to change. I mean, I guess you could, but it's not going to work to push someone to change while they're in a doing better place. You're going to have to wait until he breaks the limit, or you're going to have to sit back and hope that he sort Gets out of this moderation. And I'm sure it's not moderation. I'm sure whatever he's doing is way excessive, but in his mind it's better. And maybe it is better, but you're going to have to wait till something happens to have any credibility to bring it up. If you bring it up now and in his mind he's doing a lot better, you're going to ruin your credibility because he's going to think you're crazy. You're never happy. You're overreacting. That's what they're going to think. So you're just going to have to sit back and wait if it's addiction. The unmanageability will come back. He won't be able to stick with it consistently. So just get your plan ready and sit on wait in the meantime. And don't bring up the unhealthy eating and stuff like that. My spouse has been dealing with alcohol abuse for 17+ years. Does the clock start ticking for things to get better since I got myself out of the bad guy role? Or 10 years ago when we first started talking about the problem, but I was still in the bad guy role. I mean, I think the clock starts ticking as far as movement when they start having change talk, which I think what you're telling me, Phil, is that he's been having some change talk like a long time. You're going to have to use your judgment to figure out. It's kind of like the person before. It's like, are they just They know I want them to stop. So whenever I bring it up, they just say what they think I want to hear. Or are they bringing it up like spontaneously? Or you get the impression like, no, they're really getting serious. But getting out of the bagger role is definitely will speed up the clock. So I don't know if it started before that, but it'll speed it up. So nice work. All right, we are running out of time, Bree says, for today. I want to say thank you for everyone who showed up live. I love it when you're here. If you're watching the replay, I'd love to have you on a live video. You can interact with us. We are live every Thursday at 1. We release and publish new videos every Tuesday morning. And don't forget, there are resources in the description, and I'll see you guys next week. Bye, everybody.